Category Archives: WordPress

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WordPress is well-known for releasing new version updates quite frequently. It’s been just a year since WordPress 4.3 was launched, and now the CMS giant has introduced its new 4.4 version. Called as “Clifford”, the recent version update brings forth many new features just like older WordPress versions.

Through this article, I’ll be helping you learn about WordPress 4.4 new features worth exploring.

1. Twenty Sixteen Theme

Well, one of the most common features you can expect from every WP version release is a new default theme. And this time is no different, as the 4.4 version has introduced a brand new default theme, referred to as “Twenty Sixteen”. What makes the theme distinct from previous default themes is its modern yet minimalist look and feel.

In fact, the new theme looks a lot like the Tumblr blog rather than a typical WordPress blog. Also it delivers the same kind of experience across devices similar to Tumblr blogs. In addition, it can also be changed using a wide collection of color schemes.

2. Responsive Images

The second most notable feature of WordPress 4.4. version is responsive images. For quite long, making a site’s images responsive has been a pain for WP users and developers alike. But now with the responsive images feature, you no longer have to worry about making your images scale to the fit any device screen. Since this is a built-in feature of 4.4 version, you just need to activate it.

3. Embed WordPress Posts Directly Into Other Sites

Lastly, now you will have the ability to embed all your WP posts into any other WordPress website(s) without much hassle with 4.4 version update. Till many years, WP users had the capability that allowed them to embed content from other sites (and sources) into their blog posts. And now, you can embed posts into sites. To do so, you will have to drop a WordPress post URL into the post editor. This will automatically embed the post.

Each embedded WP post will showcase: title, excerpt, and featured image. Besides this, website’s favicon, comment links and/or post sharing options, are also expected to be included in the new version release.

Conclusion

All the above three features discussed look promising and seem to help WordPress users have great fun and better control at customizing a WP powered site. In case you are having difficulty in implementing any of these features, it is advised that you must consider taking up a WordPress professional assistance.

If you’re joining the world of blogging, then you’ll most likely hear about WordPress.com. It’s a popular blogging site co-created by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and his company known as Automattic. WordPress.com comes with tools that will help you blog, and most importantly, it helps in hosting your WordPress website or blog for free.

But, discussing about what WordPresss.com does isn’t our agenda in this article. Instead, we intend to exert on the major enhancements that have been introduced in WordPress.com, making the WordPress.com platform gets a revamp and become 100% open-source platform. Read on further to know more about the story behind the new face of WordPress.com.

What Convinced Automattic to Relaunch WordPress.com?

A lot has changed and many new developments have been made since WordPress was introduced back in 2003 as an open-source blogging platform. And today, it has evolved into a full-fledged CMS that powers over 25 percent websites over the web. But after successfully completing 10 years of legacy, Automattic (the company that was founded by Matt Mullenweg) realized that they need to build modern and more mobile-friendly experiences to stay ahead of the competition – such as Medium.

As a fact, according to Matt Mullenweg “the tech wasn’t going to take them to the next decade.” This is what made the Automattic team decide on giving an overhaul to the WordPress admin interface. Although, work on revamping the interface was started a year-and-a-half ago, so as to make the admin interface responsive and a lot more faster. The company even released several new features, however, the update has been made available for public use only recently.

Below is a chart that shows the key differences between the old and new revamped version of WordPress.com:

A Look at The Major Updates Made to WordPress.com

Let us now have a quick glimpse of what all major updates have been rolled by the Automattic company:

1. New 100% open-source version of admin interface.

WordPress.com has been relaunched and features a completely new admin interface – named as Calypso – that helps in managing blogs, posting content and so on. Most importantly, some code has been made available in the interface that helps turn the WordPress.com site into an open-source software that can be used by everyone.

In case you’re already running the open-source WordPress version on your server, then you can easily activate the new admin interface using the Jetpack plugin. Let’s take a look at the features of the Calypso interface:

It’s blazingly fast.

It is written completely in JavaScript using the libraries such as Node and React.

It is 100 percent responsive.

Help in managing plugins and themes on Jetpack website.

All of the developments in Calypso in future will be made in open, since the interface is fully open source.

Supports creating and managing multi-sites and much more.

2. PHP has been replaced by JavaScript.

As a new user, you’ll probably notice how the look and feel of the blogging site has changed. But, as a programmer or developer, you’ll see something a lot more remarkable: PHP being replaced by JavaScript. As we all know, WordPress is written using PHP, but it will be a totally different thing for users to work on WordPress.com interface which has been mostly re-written in JavaScript and API calls.

JavaScript when combined with latest technologies will give you the ability to build more complex apps for both client-side and server-side.

3. A New Macintosh OS X application has been released.

You can access the WordPress.com site using a new application for Mac systems. This app works pretty much like any desktop app, as it helps combine both web technologies and desktop features to deliver the same experience as the WordPress.com site. However, soon a lot more improvements will be introduced into the Mac app such as notifications.

Final Words

Whether the new admin interface of WordPress.com, codenamed Calypso, would successfully become a part of WordPress open-source project, depends on the wants and needs of the community. Furthermore, Matt Mullenweg says that they might have to face several technical challenges in integrating their new interface since Calypso is a complete technical overhaul than just being a revamped admin interface.

Just a week after the release of WordPress 4.2 beta 1, the CMS giant released the second beta of version WordPress 4.2. Since the final release of the version WordPress 4.2 isn’t expected to happen before April, eager testers can start testing their code prior to the official release. Beta 2 release isn’t ready for production yet, and so make sure to setup a test site to test your code, instead of upgrading your live website to the new beta.

Let us now have a quick glimpse of the things you can do for testing your website against the beta 2 release.

Added a Layer of Security

While developing a WordPress website, the security of the website is one of the biggest concerns among site owners. Luckily, WordPress provides several security measures to keep a site secure from vulnerabilities. For instance, it asks for FTP or SSH information when upgrading or installing plugins automatically. But this may not be true for all WordPress sites. In simple words, you might not be asked to enter any FTP connection information before a plugin update. But beta 2 has resolved this issue, and added support for entering “FTP and SSH credentials” at the time of updating plugins.

Better Cross-browser Support for Emoji

Observing the growing popularity of Emoji characters, support for the same was added with the release of beta 1, however, with beta 2 you’ll experience improved cross-browser support for emoji. Jaynes, the lead of the beta 2 release, encourage users using an older browser to report about any issues they’ve while using emoji.

“Press This” Feature Has Been Refined

With the release of the first beta version of WordPress 4.2, “Press This” feature was redesigned, to make it more mobile-friendly. And now, with the second beta release, this feature has been further refined with the introduction of auto-embedded media. In addition, content scanning has also improved.

Multiple Bug Fixes

Just as you know that WordPress releases bug fixes, with every version, and the new beta release has introduced over 70 changes within a week after beta 1 release.

Addition to the WP_Comment_Query Class

WP_Comment_Query has helped post authors to retrieve comments from the database. In order to make this class more useful, beta 2 has added a constructor and better method consistency in WP_Comment_Query. Let’s have a detailed view of this:
Constructor is the simple function of a class which gets executed automatically when an object of the class is created. However, constructor isn’t used when executing the wp_comment_query class. Here’s an example of WP_Comment_Query:

$comments_query = new WP_Comment_Query; [here we are creating the object of WP_Comment_Query class ]
$comments = $comments_query->query( $args ); [here we are executing wp_comment query using the query funtion ]

However, with the beta 2 release, a constructor has been added and method consistency has been improved in WP_Comment_Query. For example, in the proposed beta version we can set our query parameter directly on object creation as shown below:

Although, both codes will produce the same result, but the second one is fast, as it comes with the capability to initialize the query argument at the same time because of the constructor.

Wrapping Up!

As a WordPress user or developer, you’ll certainly be interested in learning about some exciting new improvements that takes place in the WordPress ecosystem. If you’ve already tested WordPress 4.2 beta 1, it’s time to get yourself prepared for testing beta 2 release made available by the CMS giant.

WordPress Beta Tester plugin will help you get hooked up with the new beta release easily. If you don’t wish to use the plugin, you can download the beta zip file from WordPress.org beta 2 announcement post.

WordPress is our territory, and we have a proven track record of not leaving any rough spot. As a PSD to WordPress conversion service provider, WordPress has under its belt a decade of experience and a legion of highly satisfied clients.

The WordPress websites we deliver have continually helped business to grow and prosper, riding on the exceptional set of features that they enjoy on the website, which fuels them to further their reach in the market. At Wordprax, we build WordPress themes that contain endless possibilities. Their customizability makes them highly suited across different domains, and their robustness makes sure there are no site crashing risks for you to contend with.

Our PSD to WordPress conversion is characterized by:

#1.) International Coding Standards

Not leaving any grey areas, we adhere to W3C compliance standards and make sure there are no bumps in quality. Besides that, we keep our codes SEO semantic so that your website is kept in sync with the search engine algorithms.

#2.) Diverse Services

Our industry-wide expertise can be owed to our extensive team of developers who have learned WordPress skills over many years from global engagements with the biggest of brands and their websites. Each member in our team brings something new to the table, and this further fuels innovation at Wordprax. Our diverse expertise enables us to create fresh themes, customize existing ones and transform existing websites into powerful WordPress themes.

3.) Processes Honed by Futuristic Technology

Conditioned for excellence, we make use of technology that powers us to be exclusive, excellent and unabatedly exceedingly precise to client requirements. We leverage only the state-of-the-art tools that can produce WordPress solutions of the highest order.

The testament to our reliably stirring WordPress solutions are some of our projects that speak for themselves:

The Most Perfect View: We were asked to build a travel website that flaunted sleek designs, flamboyant visuals and exquisite imagery in its full glory, while retaining responsiveness and browser-friendliness. The result was The Most Perfect View.

Soccer Schools: Soccer Schools is an image and video-heavy website that is not only rich in visual content, but contains a whole lot of information broadcasted via text. We paid close attention to the minutest of details and created a winning portal for our client.

Midwest Metal Fabrication and Custom Rolling, Inc: Again, the most perfect example of our versatility, the website of Midwest Metal Fabrication and Custom Rolling, Inc required a different type of approach and template design, which precisely what we delivered. Aptly structured, each element in the website stays true to the industry it is representing.

The most stand out feature of Wordprax’s services is adaptability. Be it a website for game developers, or be it for a construction company, our experts are adept at adapting themselves to the changing dynamics.

With their static existing websites transformed into dynamic WordPress websites, our clients have been able to grab the most extraordinary opportunities and make serious impact in the market, stepping ahead of their competition with authority.

Our clients have also been gracious in expressing their satisfaction with our services:

“You can reliably place your trust in WordPrax. They have been sincere and hard-working, and not to mention, brilliant in their application. Their technologies are unmatched. As partners, have a long, long way to go” - Bill Berry, Aviva Builders, Inc.

“Quality, turnaround time, competency – everything leaps. 10 out of 10 is how I rate WordPrax services. The dedication they have shown to my project is unbeatable and they have surely exceeded expectations by miles” - Stacy MorganMarkets United, Inc.

“Being a partner of WordPrax for more than a year now, I can assuredly claim that they are the best markup service providers I have worked with. Apart from being experts, they also bring a good work ethics to the table” - Sinthiya Adams, Mobisol Pvt Ltd.

As we take strides towards the future, we vow to keep serving our customers in a manner most effective and efficient. So, for those who are ready to make a move to the big league, let Wordprax fuel you up.

The minor issues with your business website can snowball into serious discrepancies and the scenario might as well compel you to conk out. Building a WordPress website that serves to be the online representation of your business is an endeavor that needs to be approached with a lot of logic and caution, and just a few missteps can put a huge question mark on your credibility. Apparently, loss of credibility is a nasty burn on any business across any domain.

“Mind-Boggling” is a Stimulus, But Credibility is the Fodder

No matter how remarkably great your website appears to your visitors, if there are slack elements to its believability, you would be doing a great deal of disservice to your prospects. And the lack of credibility can’t be swept under the rug, regardless of your hard-worked efforts. Once you lose your audience’s trust, not even the abundance of wham, bam factory job will come to the rescue.

Your website is aimed at expanding your business’ reach on a platform that is crowded by a new website every second. There is much to choose and try out for your potential users. Thus, your portal may come across as another attempt by a random individual/business to catch the fancy of Internet users. What you need is your target audience taking you seriously and that’s where having a website that creates the right impression matters.

How to Inject Credibility to Your Site

Once there is an inherent realization of its significance, there are more than one ways you will need to keep in consideration while adding credibility to your website:

Let Authenticity be Your Hallmark

Transparency is unfailingly a major contributor to the trust that customers place in your brand. This is how you establish it:

Let customers know that your website represents a genuine business

Let customers know you are expert in your job and in the services you are offering by the means of content you display on the site.

Let customers know that your company is driven not by just a hard-worked approach, but also by individuals who are honest and committed to customer service.

Once your customers have an assurance that you are trustworthy, the trust may start pouring in soon enough.

Don’t Make your Website Robotic

Filling every page with promotional content won’t serve the cause

Add content and images to the pages in order o make the site more interactive

Create a contact form wherefrom your potential customers can contact you

Have a chat window on your site wherefrom your customers can have one to one interaction with an executive from your company. Adding a personalized touch never fails.

Post genuine testimonials on the website by clients who have registered their presence across the industrial realm.

Flaunt the awards and certifications you have received over the period of time as a businesses

In the “About Us” page, include elaborative information about not just the company, but also about the individuals at the helm.

Make it Easy for Your Visitors to Verify the Info you are Providing

On your website, either you are indulged in self-promotion, or you are providing some industry-specific information. Make sure you have the right references for the information bits. Until you become a brand that is trusted globally, your visitors would need references to cross-check the information they get from you.

Do Not Let Errors Crawl In

You might pave way to a huge gulf between you and your potential customers if your website contains silly errors in grammar, information-accuracy, spelling errors, or for that matter, leading-to-nowhere links. Internet audience, with its lack of patience, is easily put off by these errors and don’t waste any time in thinking of you as a novice brand. Worse, they navigate off to your competitors site. Especially when you convert your existing website to WordPress, you need to be absolutely careful that the conversion takes place without any glitches.

So, there is no escaping the fact that credibility is the key to success and lack of it is the key to doom. Make sure you are perched on the plausive side.

With technology undergoing constant upgradations every year, it has become quite essential for people to build websites that have the caliber of grabbing the attention of target audience. Website being the best way of interacting with your audience expects you to pay special attention to creating one that is efficient and fully-functional. If you’re running your own Joomla powered website then a theme migration from Joomla to WordPress can serve as a brilliant means of empowering your site with innovative features and functions. In this blog, I’ve focused on boosting the performance of a Joomla website by switching its theme to WordPress.

WordPress is a globally accepted open source content management system(CMS)

Today, WordPress is considered as one of the widely used and recommended open source content management systems across the globe. The cost-efficiency of WordPress has made it an ideal choice of small and big business owners who’re looking for creating a unique niche in the world of business. When you choose to convert Joomla to WordPress theme for your site, you get the opportunity of enjoying a range of benefits that allow you to build a remarkable market reputation.

Complete freedom to decide the look and feel of website

Theme migration from Joomla to WordPress renders you complete freedom of deciding the visual feel and the overall functionality of your website. Whether it’s about the design, layout or the functionality, this website theme conversion helps you connect with your target audience on an immediate basis. In this way, you can achieve a completely unique stature for your online portal.

Scope of website customization is endless

Easy website customization has always been the prime concern of every individual who seeks to attain a unique niche over the World Wide Web. Transforming Joomla theme into WordPress enables you to avail the flexibility of customizing the website in any manner you want. With an endless scope of customization,you can easily incorporate plugins that will allow you to make tweaks to the site’s original functionality. In addition to this, you can even enrich your website with modules that would make room for improvements in the site’s content, layout, functionality etc.

Search engines simply love WordPress

Search engine ranking is a key parameter that decides the success or failure of a website. Unlike in the case of a Joomla powered website, a site that has a WordPress theme is much more friendly with all popular search engines. By modifying the Joomla theme to WordPress, you can equip your site with search engine friendly features. Your all-new WordPress website will thus rank higher on all the topmost search engine results pages and get noticed by a wide majority of related audience.

Multi-website management via a single admin panel

Nowadays, it’s quite common for individuals to operate multiple websites. Migration from Joomla to WordPress is an effective way of managing multiple websites using a single administrative panel. Since all these websites are independent of each other, you need not worry about operating separate admin panels for each of them.

Considering all the aforementioned pros of Joomla to WordPress conversion, it won’t be wrong to say that a website which has been upgraded to WordPress theme is definitely capable of turning maximum eye balls. So, go ahead and opt for this website theme conversion to build an online presence that’s both authentic as well as ever-lasting.

The rich pleasures of setting up your shopping website on WordPress are known far and abound. Easily the best CMS around, WordPress has been gaining ground from its competitors thick and fast. And thus, you have either people urgently looking for existing WP themes, or resorting to HTML to WordPress theme conversion to transform their static website into a highly powerful and dynamic one.

However, with any Internet property, security is always the chief concern. There are a host of highly skilled, yet maliciously intended coders who are looking for loopholes in the websites to gain a backdoor and spell doom for the site owners. With eCommerce websites, the threats are further elevated.

A website that falls short on the security front is least likely to inspire the users to buy from the website and enter their credit card details. The stakes on eCommerce websites are higher since users are meant to enter the confidential informational bits regarding their bank accounts, and thus, a secure site will give users an assurance that the information they enter is safe with you.

Now, as feature rich as WordPress is, there are always some dangers lurking around, owing to certain loopholes that may have crept in. Below, we throw light on some of the most-recommended measures you can take to augment the security of your WordPress website:

Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

In the web realm, SSL is a famed concept, particularly among those dealing with Internet security technologies. In its bare bones, SSL encrypts your connections and data and makes them incomprehensible for the hackers to break into. Only the authorized users have the key to decrypt the data and read it. The whole communication channel is rendered unreadable for the illegitimate users, and thus, it proves to be very handy to boost the security standards of any website.

Go for a WordPress Theme that Inspires Confidence

There are hordes of WordPress themes out there. Some are premium while others are freely available. Are all good for your website? No. when you are in the process of choosing a theme for your website, you need to be absolutely sure that it is not one of those uploaded by hackers just to gain unauthorized access into the sites. There are many themes that are lying there in some corner of the WordPress repository and contain malware and malicious codes to help the theme builder to gain access to any website that uses the theme. Thus, before you install a theme, be absolutely certain that you read the reviews about it and pay attention to the rating awarded to it. The freely available themes can also be trusted, but when you let loose some cash on buying a premium theme, it further improves your chances of running a safer eCommerce website.

Tailor the .htaccess File

Modifying the .htaccess of your website against the security lapses and threats also comes handy to protect your website against anomalies. Many intruders right away attack on a website’s database by leveraging techniques like SQL injection, via which they can inject manipulative commands in the website. However, you can add some code snippets into your website’s .htaccess file. These snippets basically act as rules for accessing your website and filter the accesses based on IP addresses and URL requests.

Change the Defaults with Admin Logins

The biggest security lapse you can make is keeping the admin username as “admin”. Brute force attacks are the most common forms of security attacks on te Internet. This is the first name that hackers have to guess while attempting to break into your website. With only password left to intercept, you are already making their job half-accomplished.

Keep the Updates Rolling

If you haven’t received the memo yet, WordPress updates’ greatest incentive for your website is bolstered security. If your WordPress website’s update hasn’t seen the light of the day as yet, a danger is just lurking round the corner. It is not just to enhance the site’s performance in terms of its plugins and speed, but the upgrades of themes and plugins also inculcate newer algorithms against the newer attacks and viruses.

It’s not just eCommerce, but security lapses can prove to be nasty burns for any sort of website. So, be wise and start paying attention to the security aspect right from the get go.

The popularity of WordPress Development Companies speaks a lot about the constantly growing demand for WordPress solutions and services. WordPress is a vast arena and comes in two variants viz: WordPress.org and WordPress.com. While the former one refers to an organization that delivers free downloadable WordPress installations, the latter one represents an entity that renders WordPress software as a ready-to-use service. If you’re thinking about choosing WordPress.com instead of WordPress.org, here’s a blog that will help you learn more about the cons of WordPress.com and why avoiding it can turn to be your best decision.

Here’s a list of reasons why ditching WordPress.com for WordPress.org is good:

1. Access to a limited number of themes and plug-ins:-
Themes and plugins form two crucial aspects of a WordPress powered website. Well, with WordPress.com, you’re constrained to the themes allowed by the site. Currently, the website serves as the hub for 160 themes with some of them available for free and others for a specific sum of cash. Since WordPress.com doesn’t render you flexibility of changing the page structure, you’re infact dependent on the theme’s structure that the author permits you to change.

2. Content and Copyright issue is a part and parcel of WordPress.com:-
The TOS(Terms of Service) of WordPress.com clearly states that the website has royalty-free access to all your data which can further be used for promoting your WordPress enriched website/blog. In other words, by submitting content to WordPress, com, you grant the site a permission to reproduce, modify and publish the same for displaying, circulating and promoting your blog. Moreover, by choosing WordPress.com, you showcase your confirmation for placement of advertisements on your blog/site. However, you may get these ads removed by paying a marginal sum of $30 per blog on a per annum basis.

3. Adding style comes for a cost:-
On WordPress.com, once you’ve settled on a theme and want to make a few tweaks, you need to purchase the Custom Design Upgrade that can use the CSS available on your blog. Currently, the service is available at a price of $30 per blog on a per year basis. This could get quite pricey in accordance to the count of blogs that need to be customized. In all, handling custom WordPress development seems a challenge if you’ve chosen WordPress.com.

To sum it all, WordPress.com can turn to a bad choice for someone who wants to have complete over his/her WordPress site/blog. Loaded with some serious design limitations, dumping WordPress.com is a good option. Then what should you choose? WordPress.org is the answer. Whether its about having an access to numerous themes/plugins, handling the content/copyright matters or adding styles to your site, WordPress.org can serve as your best partner. So, go ahead and leverage the best potential of WordPress.org for making the most of your web presence.

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Welcome to Wordprax

WordPrax offers WordPress development services that are quality driven, user friendly and cutting edge. We follow only the most ethical business practices for conferring our clients with exceedingly optimized and compelling WordPress solutions.

Substantiated by state-of-the-art infrastructure and authentic client testimonies, WordPrax blends together the latest in web development, user engagement parameters and the in-vogue demands.
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